Coming to My Senses: A Story of Perfume, Pleasure, and an Unlikely Bride

“It’s been a long while since I’ve read a book so luscious. This memoir about falling in love with perfume made me want to smell everything.” -Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You


“A woman, I think we can all agree, should smell like herself. But which self?” 

Late one night near the middle of her life when all her careful plans have gone awry, Alyssa Harad stumbles across a blog devoted to reviewing perfume. She is not the kind of woman who wears perfume. But she is a reader, and the ability to describe a fragrance unfolding in the air with words seems like a magic trick. In the reviews perfume becomes a place, a person, a moment in history. Perfume becomes a story at a moment when she needs a new one. Harad follows the magical trail of scent from a private museum of rare essences in Austin, Texas, to the glamorous fragrance showrooms of Manhattan, and finally to a homecoming in Boise, Idaho—undoing and expanding her understanding of gender, femininity, pleasure and identity along the way. Candid, elegant, insightful, full of lush description and gentle humor, Coming to My Senses reveals the intimate connections between our senses and our selves.